This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

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Monday, December 29, 2014

Reflections of an Octogenarian: Educational Reform, or Stop Me if You've Heard This One Before

Good historical retrospective on educational reform and how bad we are as a country about not remembering those things in our educational histories that have actually worked well and not-so-well. Instead of learning from this experience, education seems to always get "re-made" as a response to shifting political winds.

All I would add to this analysis is that even at its worst, there has always been a class of children that has systematically reaped the rewards of this system, as well. As nonsensical as they may appear to us now, this is what has helped sustain these reform efforts across time. In policy, we've always said, "Once the middle class is unduly impacted (which is what happens in policy once there's over-reach), that's when things are going to begin to change.

At least in Texas, we appear to be in that moment now. The only significant concern is whether educational reforms—like fair and equitable school funding, an informational (rather than punishing) accountability system, project-based, authentic assessment and the like—can outpace the privatization policy making agenda in our state this next legislative session that begins in January in time for public education to save its soul—whatever is left of it—that is, after so many years of shaming and blaming our schools and teachers under this neoliberal model of Texas-style accountability.

On a positive note, since Texas is ground zero for high-stakes accountability, any positive changes we make here in this regard bode well for the rest of the country. After all, the system we have in place is a bipartisan bad idea. Rather than bailing out of this system and not be accountable at all (which is what some districts would be perfectly fine with), we need to craft thoughtful alternatives with respect to both assessment and accountability—which are overlapping, yet conceptually distinct aspects of the whole. And yes, this does mean reaching backwards into our educational roots—not only as schools and districts, but also as parents and communities exercising greater voice and control in public education. As a civil rights community, we need to reacquaint ourselves with our enduring legal and legislative struggles for quality, inclusion, and equity in education. We need to embrace and give fresh meaning to the Deweyan ideal of classrooms as laboratories for democracy.

Gore
Vidal once referred to the U.S.A. as "The United States of Amnesia."
In no area of human endeavor is forgetfulness more the norm than it is
in education.

It's a notion I have not taken to gracefully. My
current mantra is, "Been there, seen it, done it;" followed by the old
saw that insanity is doing the same thing but expecting different
results. A function of old age, congenital contrariness, and just plain
weariness, it's what comes of former educational reformers. They don't
go quietly into the dark night but go down yelling loudly right to the
very end.

Bitterly complaining about the quality of American
education is part of our history. When I first became a teacher in the
1950s, it was James Conant, former President of Harvard, and Admiral
Rickover, father of the atomic submarine. In 1957, came the political
outcry in reaction to fears of Russian global ascendancy with the
launching of Sputnik -- attributing America's failure to be number one
in space to lack of rigor in our schools.

Over a half century
later, President Obama revived that specter, recalling how Sputnik
provoked the United States to increase investment in math and science
education and helped America win the space race. He warned that with
billions of people in India and China having been "suddenly plugged into
the world economy," only those nations with the most educated workers
would prevail," and how, "America is in danger of falling behind." Here
we go again -- more fire-bells ringing in the mid of night.

Back
to the 1960s and the Great Society -- a time when federal efforts in
education ramped up significantly in the form of assistance to schools
and colleges seeking to eliminate racial segregation, developing new
strategies for educating disadvantaged children and in broadening access
to higher education for previously neglected youths. Many programs
failed; a few succeeded. Lessons from these efforts provide instructive
experiences that can guide future efforts in educational reform. But for
the most part they have been ignored.

The late '60s and '70s
featured a blossoming of educational reform and a progressive vision.
Programs of compensatory education were joined with the free school and
alternative education movements. Most of these efforts, however, were
not taken seriously and were prematurely aborted -- succeeded by a wave
of counter-reaction. They have also been banished from recent memory.
The 1980s were driven by A Nation at Risk,
a report chronicling the latest "crisis," citing abysmally low basic
skill scores, low basic comprehension rates, and high drop-out rates,
recommending more rigorous standards, the standardization of curricula,
and a program of National testing... Sound familiar?

In keeping
with its recommendations, by the mid-1980s, 45 states had gotten with
the program, expanding their testing programs, instituting more
strenuous graduation requirements, cutting frills, and returning to
basics (as if they had ever left them in the first place). In the end,
however, it all proved so much sound and fury... signifying nothing.
Research revealed that this highly orchestrated and costly effort had
not the slightest effect on student learning and comprehension. Even
when legislated merit pay systems were added to the mix, little of this
trickled down to the classroom. None of it ever enhanced the students'
ability to learn.

Shouldn't this historical backdrop have been
at least noted amid the current hue and cry for more rigorous standards
and high-stake testing procedures? If not, the current effort must be
judged to be more about public relations and politics than serious
educational thought, in which case, damn the torpedoes (and the history)
and full speed ahead!

Many eons ago, I taught plane geometry. I
took special pleasure in its leitmotif which was both simple and
elegant. The subject matter started with a few simple axioms which
students could then use to prove a series of theorems. The neat thing
about the process was that after you had proven a particular theorem,
there was no need to reprove it. You could simply cite it in proving
subsequent theorems with which you were confronted. And so the subject
matter built, brick by brick, theorem by theorem -- a glorious
superstructure of thought unfolding before your very eyes.

There
is no such historical consciousness in American education. We go
through a variety of experiences, bad and good, yet learn nothing from
them. We invent terrific programs but go on to forget we had ever done
so. Can you detect a trace of not only bitterness but also sadness in my
voice, as one who led such efforts?

There is no reason that any
profession should ignore its past and spend its current energy
reinventing everything it knows. Imagine if medical research, seeking to
create new and effective vaccines, ignored past failures and successes
to do so. That would be totally unacceptable. Yet in education such
insanity is an ingrained and acceptable pattern.

Meanwhile,
articles appear regularly in our press, celebrating new approaches,
often billed as "revolutionary." In reality, however, they are only
shadow replicas of what has been done before. They are characterized by
a remarkable failure of attribution; and by promoting their novelty and
exaggerating their potential impact, lull readers into a false sense of
complacency and a congratulatory attitude that we are at last on the
right track, perpetuating the myth that society really cares about such
matters while fostering the illusion that the culture is truly thinking
outside the box.
Does anyone out there remember Title III? Title
I, yes: additional funding for schools serving poor kids; Title IX,
yes: gender equity in schools, and its impact on women's athletics. But
Title III?

"Doh!" Decades before charter schools became our anointed
savior, groups of eager parents and inspired teachers nationwide,
started their own schools, serving public school students using public
funds, both federal and local. How soon they forget.

There has
never been a dearth of good ideas, good people, and good programs. There
has only been a failure of will -- to act on what is already known.
"Been there, seen it, done it."
What were those lessons? Stay tuned. Is anyone there?
Larry Paros is a former high school math and social studies teacher. He
was at the forefront of educational reform in the 1960s and 70s, during
which time he directed a unique project for talented underprivileged
students at Yale and created and directed two urban experimental
schools, cited by the U.S. Office of Education as "exemplary" which were
later replicated at more than 125 sites nationwide.